Atlanta Metro Growth Stalled

Manufacturing Drove Atlanta Metro Growth and rural Georgia counties prospered as well. Now we are stalled, but we’re not alone; most other states are stalled too.

In 1980, the population of Metro Atlanta was 2.2 million.  Manufacturing had been moving from North to South since the 1960s to shed its union shackles.  Cities in the South were attractive because of lower cost of living, better weather and larger houses. 

The Electronics Boom

In the 1980s, all the pieces were in place to develop the Personal Computer.  Since TI’s development of the integrated circuit in the 1970s, engineers had been improving components and technology to develop electronic devices aimed at wide applications. Engineers developed radio frequency devices and digital signal processing to digitize telephones and create the cell phones we have today, but the big product was the Personal Computer that allowed giant leaps in business productivity. Manufacturing Doubled Atlanta.

The surge in manufacturing from 1980 to 1990 was responsible for the doubling of the Atlanta Metro population.  Consumer and Defense Electronics manufacturing was huge and was accompanied by manufacturing of all sorts of devices and products. Following the PC we digitized the telephone and had a cell phone boom. 

In 1993 with the passage of NAFTA, only the US Auto manufacturers move to Mexico at first. Then other manufacturers followed, moving production to Asia.

After 1993, we saw lots of tech companies leave Atlanta and move back to their headquarters locations or overseas. By 2000 most all circuit board manufacturing had moved to China. You can’t have a sustainable economy without manufacturing.

Atlanta had been good location to expand to during that high production period, but after the peak, the companies moved out.  During that time, we automated manufacturing to improve quality; that was accomplished by 2000. That accomplishment also allowed companies to move manufacturing overseas. We were the victims of our own success.

Our economic prospects are not good. Excessive federal spending has taken our national debt from $5 trillion to $18 trillion since 2000.  Our inflation threat is high, as the Federal Reserve increased the money supply by 450% with printed money. Excessive immigration has left 92 million working age citizens without jobs. Federal government policies are killing our economy.

Our recent oil and natural gas finds can help eliminate our trade deficit, but government regulations need to be reduced along with corporate taxes to avoid further economic collapse.

NAFTA and other Trade Agreements have allowed the off-shoring of most manufacturing operations and it will take some changes to get these back.

There are currently no “shovel ready” technological developments to rival the PC Boom and our tax and regulatory environment, so all we can do right now is increase production of everything that has a demand.

We need to drastically reduce federal spending to stop debt growth, freeze immigration roll back regulations and return manufacturing to the US.

Norb Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader